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Evidence gathering: Flash vs other plugins?

Dear all,

I know that the time before last when NPD did some research on plugins, Macromedia published a breakdown of Flash Player vs other players, such as Windows Media Player and QuickTime. However, MM now have the latest NPD research and don't seem to include that this time. Does anyone know where I can find Flash vs other players and plugins in terms of market penetration? I can't find anything and I don't want to pay for research at this stage.

Hi Gol, give us (or me ;-) some time to redesign the site first (currently helping out with the In-links/In-portal beta test - due to use it for Best Flash V2 :-) - not certain how the new design will line up but there'll not doubt be a friends sections

The way to do it independently would be to set up a site for The Browsing Public and log the player versions returned by Javascript and VBScript to a database. Would have to involve a redirect on the homepage, though.

From what I can see MM's stats shows how many people pressed a button syaing they could see the movie animation. Not sure how accurate this could be as users of Flash Player 3 can play native FP5 movies, just not run the AS.

Anyway, I think we are on the verge of making Flash Player 6 apps for the browsing public and not having to worry about downloaditis.
Web Developers tend to pick up the latest player quickly methinks.

I'd agree with that. Web developers and broadband users too. What people don't realise is that even with dial-up, the Flash upgrade only takes about 10 seconds. MM are really smart like that... unlike Apple. It's something stupid like an 8Mb download. I mean realistically, who's going to bother with that on a dial-up?? I don't! If I need to upgrade QT I download it at work and chuck it on to a CD. And if I didn't have access to broadband at all, I simply wouldn't bother.

Was thinking about my own survey. In fact, I think Chas is doing one anyway (I'm not sure though... are you Chas?) I'm sure he'd charge me an appropriate fee for the data, mind you...

In fact, I think Chas is doing one anyway (I'm not sure though... are you Chas?) I'm sure he'd charge me an appropriate fee for the data, mind you...

G

This is a feature ill be looking to add to the redesign of my site using a small Flash 4 movie (invisible 8x8 pixels) to record the stats to MySQL (checking for Flash Player Versions 4, 5 or 6) and save a cookie that updates or deletes each month.

Seriously, good idea.. remember $version wasn't introduced until 4.0r11 ...so that may have to be taken into account.
Will you be able to log the no flash stats that way, though? As they won't access the AS... (neither will 3 or 2 but thems miniscule).

good idea.. remember $version wasn't introduced until 4.0r11 ...so that may have to be taken into account.
Will you be able to log the no flash stats that way, though? As they won't access the AS... (neither will 3 or 2 but thems miniscule).

Thanks. It was a few months back i designed a working version of this. It worked by registering every new hit to the stats Flash movie and subtracting the total Flash player 4, 5 and 6 hits to give the no Flash or player 4 and under stats.

Originally Posted by greg.harvey

Erm, surely "no Flash" stats would be anyone where a version isn't found....? Should be easy enough.

Wasn't that happy with the reliability of using that method.

Thinking about it another way could be to use Javascript to check for Flash version 4.011 and above - if true write the stats movie param code which'll save the exact Flash 4 or higher version to MySQL - if false write a transparent image (8x8 pixels) that calls a Perl script to update the under 4 and no Flash column in SQL - probably wouldn't want to record the noscript stats as you wouldn't want search engine bot hits.

Could also use the JS version to write the cookie or do nothing if it already exists (been called once already this month).

As an aside, you might be interested in my fooling around with server side detection - I used version detection in Flash to check if the player needed updating.

I set a minimum version of 5 and got both v4 and 3 going to the upgrade frame... funny given the use of dot syntax -- I thought these two would just bung the code up.
v2 did that - failed to load the movie.